Now that we’ve covered that entire storyline, this was kind of a super-fun episode. One of the things I like best about when Katherine and Elena face off – whether Elena’s in humanity mode, human mode, or none of the above – is that it makes her up her game. She has to step a little quicker where Katherine’s concerned, and the brilliant part about it is that she can. She’s good enough at thinking like La Pierce that she can usually keep pace with her, these days. This time, she was almost a step ahead.

Of course, this in turn makes all the others ramp things up. Rebekah is always working at a just-this-side-of-annoying evil bent, but I really like when Damon and Stefan wordlessly admit they’re so far out of their depth that they have to band together to catch Elena or Katherine. It actually makes them seem more like brothers, like after all these years they have a genetic link, and it’s “Let’s make sure our dickiness doesn’t get in the way of catching people who are smarter than us”. It’s kind of cool actually.

Of course, they both played themselves for fools where Elena was concerned.

This is how they are going to convince us that she’s not just Katherine redux, and not just playing dress up, by the way. First of all, she’s ruthless in her exploitation of Katherine and I also kind of feel like she might just as well kill Rebekah when she’s done with her. But more importantly, turning off her humanity hasn’t turned off Elena’s desires, and the fact that she does not want the cure makes me like her even more. (She needs to learn a little about personal responsibility, though. Bodies you leave lying around are nobody’s responsibility but your own.) She has made a decision about her lie, and she gets to do so. Everyone can scream until they’re blue in the face about “she made the decision without her humanity” but before that they were screaming about her being sired to Damon and I’m sure before that they were screaming about her being sick with grief due to Alaric but you know what? Everyone makes decisions based on what has happened. Everyone makes decisions based on where they are in their lives, right now, and Elena deserves – as an adult –to be no different. All her bad decisions will make her who she is, and she’s entitled to that.

Similarly, Rebekah is entitled not to be a vampire anymore if that’s really what she wants. As she said to Elijah (he suddenly somehow got hot to me), “We’ve had 20 lifetimes together. Isn’t that enough?” It is, indeed, enough. It’s more than enough. How can people not disappoint you when they quite literally have forever to do so?

It’s for this reason that I think the Originals spinoff has the potential to be something truly special. First of all, it’s been well-laid-out. These people have full lives, but they’ve had full lives in front of us. They’re not asking us to care about the hundreds of years they lived offscreen.

They want diametrically different things. Niklaus is power-mad forever, no matter what he said about Tyler (UGH). Elijah apparently wants the love of one rogue vampire, no matter how her hair is styled (I can’t help but look at the overstated Katherine, as opposed to Elena, and - now that Elena’s hair has some movement to it - be reminded of Veronica Mars’ epic Manila Whore Barbie). And Rebekah wants to experience life for the final time, with no do-overs or help.

It’s complicated. That’s good. I want that. But it makes it even more ridiculous that a high school girl like Caroline even matters to Klaus. Truly I was so annoyed I didn’t want to deal with it at all, but I just want to say that it’s annoying, that it feels false both on his part and on the part of the woman who is endlessly carping about Tyler, and that it remains more interesting than anything to do with Bonnie.

Badass Elena might really be for real this time – this is more than just a keg stand and a bit of eyeliner. Let’s see.

Attached -- Nina Dobrev and Ian Somerhalder in Toronto to see her family for Easter which means, obviously, that they are still together.